Where did it all come from?

[phantom power]

Being an atheist, I think questions about how the heck everything got here are especially interesting. I don't get to sweep them under the rug, by believing in a god who created the universe I inhabit.

Was there once a Formless Void, prior to Existence? Is there neither beginning nor end to Existence? Or is there both a beginning and an end?

I'm fond of the idea that matter, energy, space, time, and the rules that govern them, evolved in some way from a more formless "substrate", which I might poetically call "chaos". Our universe and the physics that govern it exist in part because they are consistent, and inconsistent rules cannot persist.

The evolving cosmology described in Greg Egan's novel "Distress" seems to resonate with my intuition. Or Greg Bear's "Infinity Concerto". The rules of existence themselves evolve over time, moving through a much larger space of possibilities.

Share your thoughts!

[immoderate]

1. The prevailing cosmology...

...is that at the moment of the Big Bang, about 15 billion years ago, the space-time universe we experience started. A lot of the physics going back to that has been worked out. There are good theories going back to within microseconds of the Big Bang.

Before that, it is hypothesized that there was a Cosmic Egg, or singularity which had no space or time. It was a break in symmetry that caused the universe we experience.

We know lots of stuff, but there is still much to be answered. Some of the questions that linger are:

What are dark matter and dark energy?
Why does time seem to move in only one direction?
Are other universes with different physical laws possible?

A good place to start might be "The Elegant Universe" by Brian Green, a best seller a few years ago, and available in paperback. It explores string theory, but goes through the history of the universe along the way. Also, "A Brief History of Time" by Stephen Hawking.

There are lots of good books on cosmology.

--IMM

[phantom power]

3. where did this cosmic egg come from?

(Anybody who answers "a cosmic chicken" will be cursed forever)

I am skeptical of the whole big-bang model. I know there are plenty of good reasons why we came up with it, and it's a successful model, but there's still plenty of room for us to be wrong.

I could live with a cosmic egg as axiomatic, but something about that seems unsatisfying to me. Too absolute.

Although, with Hawking's ideas about time being in the complex-plane, it is maybe not so absolute. For that matter, if time itself fell out of this breaking symmetry, lots of things are completely unintuitive. The entire notion of "beginning" is out the window.

Maybe the problem is that the metaphor "egg" doesn't really convey how weird that initial state really was.

[trotsky]

4. "Before" the big bang (cosmic egg)

Stephen Hawking compared knowing what happened "before" the big bang as comparable to walking north FROM the North Pole. (I.e., it can't be done.)

[phantom power]

7. That sounds like his complex-plane model of time.

[fshrink]

2. There are so many things that

we don't know! Starting with our own brain... The very foundation of belief, is, as far as I'm concerned, the desperate need to obtain answers to the unexplained. Probably because it sends us back to our finitude. I can live with unanswered questions. It makes life more enjoyable.

[BlueEyedSon]

5. How do theists sweep "who created god" under the rug?

[phantom power]

6. Those who believe god created the universe don't appear to

have much interest in the question "where did god come from".

Where did the universe come from? God created it. Where did God come from? He is eternal.

That, to me, is dodging the question. Sweeping it under the rug.

Any system of knowledge is going to have it's axioms. I suppose you could look at God as the axiom for a creationist belief system. Using a Person (in this case, God), with awareness, and personality, and all the complexity that comes with it, as an axiom, seems dodgy to me. Axioms are supposed to be simple, and appeal to intuition.

There's nothing simple or intuitive about any of the gods I'm familiar with. They are characters, with motivation and complexity. Compare that with axioms from mathematics or physics.

[Beetwasher]

8. There Can Never Be Nothing

That's my personal theory. There's always been and always will be SOMETHING. However, what that something is probably changes and possibly cycles from one thing to another. So, before the big bang, the universe was something different. Possibly some sort of singularity, then for some reason, it changed and BANG, our universe came into existence. Our universe will eventually peter out and then possibly revert back to the pre-Big Bang singularity somehow and the process will start all over.

But the bottom line is, there's always something.

There are three things I can be sure of; existence, transience and infinity. That's MY "Holy Trinity".

[leftofthedial]

9. linear thinking is an unfortunate reality of the primate brain

what (when and where) is "beginning"?

The Big Bang was probably a node, not an endpoint.

I like the "Infinity Concerto" idea, but I don't know if there is evidence in support of it, or if it is just a pleasing tickle inside my brain.

My big question is "Where does it all go?"

[fshrink]

10. Why should we care is the question! nt

[Cleita]

11. My understanding of physics and astronomy is terrible, however,

reading the lastest articles in Scientific American, there is an emerging school of thought that a dying universe creates a new one, so universes have been created over and over from left over matter, well for eternity. :shrug: